Home Trained

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

In lieu of posting a new post on my memoir, I am posting an essay on depression and my relationship to my oldest daughter that I wrote a decade ago. It won a couple of awards and had been available in an online anthology of essays, but that was taken down in the last year. I received a lot of positive response to the essay over the years. I reread it before posting here and it is still relevant. I will posting an additional essay or postscript to this one sometime this summer. Here is the essay. Enjoy!

The Energy Monster

My seven-year-old daughter
Natalie calls it “The Energy Monster.”Natalie drew a picture of it on a large piece of paper in the office of
our family therapist.In the drawing the
Energy Monster stands at the foot of my bedroom.This monster has big teeth, angry eyes, and
either a jagged black tongue or a very strange, expressively-shaped text
balloon coming out of its mouth.The monster
is orange with hair cut short like mine. Encircled by orange loop-de-loops, it
is in a “frenzy.”

In the picture I am brown and
am lying on a yellow bed, my head on a pillow.I’m covered by a brown blanket that has been cross-sectioned like one of
those children’s science or “how-things-work” books that show the inside and
outside simultaneously.The blanket is
pulled up to my chin, but the side of the blanket has not been drawn in, so my
left side is exposed.She has drawn a
shirt, pants, and shoes on me in a nod toward modesty since in truth I wear
only boxer shorts to bed.Whether it is
her modesty or mine she is preserving is unclear.

I am in obvious danger.The monster could pounce on me at any moment
while I lie prone on the yellow bed—no chance to defend myself.

Tucked under one foot of the
energy monster and drawn in red marker is a building that could be our house if
our house were a three-story building instead of a ranch.Some of the orange-lined frenzy of the Energy
Monster overlaps the outline of the building.

Incongruously, Natalie has
scribbled a bright yellow sun in the upper right hand corner of the page.In red marker she has placed herself and her
younger sister Ella cramped in the lower left hand corner beside the
house.She stands there smiling while
Ella has no face.In all of Natalie’s
pictures she is smiling.I have always
found this fact pleasing because I imagine this suggests she has a positive
self view, but more likely is that all kids draw themselves smiling.

As I examine the picture more
closely, I notice that Natalie is actually closer to the Energy Monster than I
am. I ask her why she did that.

She points to a black line
she has drawn separating the monster from her and Ella.“There wasn’t enough room,” she answers.“So I drew this line to separate us.”

Then, I ask her what is she
doing.

She says she is waiting.

Waiting for what? I press.

She tells me she is waiting
for the right moment to send the Energy Monster to California.

Why California?

Because there it will melt,
she tells me.

I agree that California seems
the most likely place for the Energy Monster to go since we live on the other
side of the continent in Vermont.

Then, I look at the sun in
the upper right hand corner and think it’s not so inexplicable after all. I
soak up the warmth of that bright yellow sun, drawn in an imperfect
circle.I feel safe in its presence and
let its imaginary rays restore the energy that the monster has stolen.

Natalie and I know the Energy
Monster from different points of view.She knows the beast as a creature that takes her father away from her
and leaves an irritable, sad person.For
me, the monster is a metaphor for my depression.

When the Energy Monster is
here, I can’t tell you why it has come or what route it has taken to get
here.I am only conscious of its
presence. I am depressed and can see no way out.

When people see me, I am told
that I look listless, worn out, exhausted.My appearance is ragged.I stop
shaving and brushing my teeth.I will
wear the same shirt and pants for days on end.I prefer the dark and resist leaving the house, especially during the
day.One summer two years ago I didn’t
voluntarily leave the house for two months.During that time, I didn’t mow the lawn or attend to any yard chores.

I can easily sleep sixteen,
twenty hours a day.Oftentimes I will
get up in the morning to help prepare Ella for preschool and Natalie for
school.Then I will drive one or both to
school.At this point my wife Elise goes
to work, while I return home and to bed, only to rise when it comes time to
pick up the kids at the end of their day.Then I put the kids in front of the television to watch a video, and I
prepare dinner.After supper I return to
bed while Elise bathes the kids and gets them ready for bed.Once this is done, I read bedtime stories to
one of my kids.Then I return to bed.

Combined with my enormous
weariness is an insatiable hunger.When
I am not sleeping, I am planning my next meal or eating it.I can eat so much it becomes nearly
impossible to distinguish when one meal ends and another begins.If I must travel from one place to another,
my route inevitably detours through the drive-up window of a fast food
restaurant.

My therapist tells me that
studies have shown that depressed people crave carbohydrates.The sugar into which the carbs convert offers
a form of self-medication.The body
somehow knows the person is depressed and so signals that it needs more bread,
grains, potatoes and other carbohydrates.The difficulty arises in that I do not turn to a twelve-grain bread
sandwich packed with roasted vegetables and sprouts, but instead gravitate
toward the foods I found comforting as a child—hamburgers, French fries,
grilled cheese, salami submarines.

I think of this kind of
eating as grazing.I imagine myself as
livestock working my way across a meadow.At other times, I remember that my grandfather told me how horses drink
water until their bellies explode.I’ll
look down at my bloated stomach and fear something like that can happen to
me.I have no clear answer, but more
importantly, I won’t stop even were the answer there.

When I’m awake, whether
eating or not, I am reading. I lose myself in pulp fiction.This violent, paranoid, conspiratorial world
somehow soothes the discomfort in my bones.I’m attracted to blunt, vicious, and unyielding darkness as
characterized in the cover blurb of Jim Thompson’s The Alcoholics (Berkley:
Black Lizard Books, 1986):

Murder wouldn’t matter now, not after his brain was
already dead.He’d be better off in the
ground, anywhere but where he was, strapped to a table—a mute, tortured
imbecile.

Three men at McAlester State Prison had larger
penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar’s own
figuring, hardly human at all.His was
the largest penis ever seen on a white man in that prison or any others in
which Lamar had spent so much of his adult life.It was a monster, a snake, a ropey, veiny
thing that hardly looked at all like what it is but rather like some form of
rubber tubing.

The improbably raw and
mean-spirited plots reinforce my sense that there is real danger and malice in
my surrounding environment.I begin not
simply to suspect, but to be actually convinced, that those around me wish me
ill, that my family and friends do not like me, that they resent me.During one difficult period, I got it into my
head that I could only drink from a glass that contained four ice cubes.Somehow I had reasoned that the proportion of
ice to liquid in any sized glass was ideal with four ice cubes. It didn’t seem
to matter what size the ice cubes were—or how much liquid was poured into the
glass.I was just focused on the four
ice cubes.Whenever Elise did me the
favor of offering to get me a drink, she would inevitably forget my rigid
four-ice-cube dictum.She would put two or
three or even five ice cubes in my glass.While I can now admit that I had neglected to remind her of my beverage
policy, in the moment I would become inflamed and would then accuse her of
trying to displace the exquisite balance I had achieved in my environment.

Simultaneously, I am certain
that I have harmed my family in some deeply important way and so deserve their
abandonment.As I sit here at my desk, I
can tell you these thoughts are as absurd as you might think.Of course, I know that they aren’t true, and
even when I’m depressed there’s a part of me that knows this.Still, it feels that way.And through some weird alchemy that I’m still
untangling, in this state feelings are facts.

It used to be that I believed
the Energy Monster to be supernatural.That it followed laws beyond nature.That was why the Energy Monster could descend upon me out of the
blue.It was as if I really did wake up
on the wrong side of the bed, but all four sides were wrong.Then, just as miraculously, the beast would
vanish in a cloud of mystery.

With the work I’ve done in
hospital programs and intensive therapy, and the new kinds of medications
available for clinically depressed people, I’ve come to understand that this is
not the case.The monster is anchored in
very real biological and psychological circumstances.The most effective treatment I’ve had has
been in what is called a partial hospitalization program that I would attend
from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day.This
program was organized around the tenets of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.I attended the program twice over the course
of a year.The focus of my work there
was to identify and become conscious of habits of thinking that would distort
my reading of situations.I learned how
these cognitive distortions prepared me for and then propelled me into
depression.My therapist and I have
continued to work on these techniques, and I have seen real progress in my
ability to function and, even, enjoy life.

Nevertheless, this new
understanding is not a cure-all.In this
way I am not like many who get situationally depressed or experience a period
of depression in their lives and fully recover.I think of my friend Susan who suffered depression for many years, but
has recovered without a relapse with the help of Zoloft.I look at Elise who recently lost her
job.This event sent her into a deep
depression, which lasted several weeks.Her feelings passed eventually—however.They were situational.When the
situation changed, the depression lifted.

That my depression does not
follow one of these patterns has caused me much distress over the years.In fact, for my entire life.As a child I used to sit in church and listen
to people testify about one affliction or another.They would describe how their faith in the
Lord and prayer had lifted their need for alcohol or their lustings after
another’s wife or husband.Then, we
would sing a hymn that underscored how they were lost and now they were found
by the Lord.As I listened to these
miracles, I’d wish that it could happen to me.Then I would pray for my pain to be lifted as well, but it never
happened.For years I wondered if I were
bad or evil in some way I couldn’t identify because I could not be saved.

I felt my affliction was more
primal.Its roots were not in the New
Testament, but rather in ancient mythology.I was dammed much like Sisyphus who was forced to roll a boulder up one
of two hills, and each time he reached the top, the boulder would roll back
down and Sisyphus would have to start anew. In my worst moments, I imagined myself allied
with Prometheus who was chained to a rock, where his liver was eaten daily by a
vulture, and grew back nightly, only to be eaten again the following day.

At times, I still
characterize my depression in epic proportions, but Natalie’s drawing has
tempered this inflation of feeling.It
shows me the “cartoonish” texture of my dramas.Like a slasher movie, all of these narratives are from the victim’s
point of view where the monster is some hideous, unknown entity that is out to
do me harm.

For this reason, I keep the
picture tacked on the bulletin board in my office.When I talk on the phone or pause for a
moment, my eyes rest on the drawing.As
I look at it now, I’m reminded of what I’ve learned.

This beast has very distinct
and recognizable travel plans.The
Energy Monster never simply arrives unannounced.Instead, I can see it books its flight from
California well in advance.This Monster
is frugal.It wants the best package it
can get—meaning it wants me to pay as dear a price as can be extracted.

The Energy Monster will start
packing its bags whenever I begin to feel isolated.If Elise and I have an argument or
disagreement that is not easily resolvable, I can feel my anxiety level
increase.The first signs might be that
I dream that night of losing her in some catastrophic way—a car accident, an
earthquake, cancer.The first ten years
of my marriage I would do anything not to come into conflict with Elise.I used to brag to my friends that Elise and I
never fought.I can see this pathology
now as my unconscious effort to thwart the Energy Monster.It’s a simple syllogism:if Elise and I don’t fight, I won’t be
anxious.Therefore, I won’t become
depressed.

Over the years, I went to
great lengths to keep myself out of situations that held potential
conflict.I used to joke that I lived by
the Boy Scout Code:Safety First.My sensory perceptions became finely tuned
for any static in my environment.At a
magazine job I had when I was in my early twenties, my boss was particularly
irascible.Before I took the position to
be his assistant, he had gone through three people in six months.

In some ways I view that job
experience as my training ground.I
learned to be very skilled at modulating his moods.Elise, who worked for the same magazine, used
to joke that everyone thought I was on Valium because I handled him so
well.In truth, I was so calm because I
was exhausted.All my attention was
focused on keeping this man happy.When
he was upset or angry, I would find some way to change his mood.I might go out and buy him ice cream.Or I might share a particularly delicious
piece of office gossip.Usually, I
simply acted like a devoted puppy.When
he was in a good mood, I worked hard to protect it.I would deflect all bad news.I would hold potentially combustive phone
messages aside until I could find a safe way to pass them along.

In that small office we
shared at the end of a hall, I learned to be an exquisite listening
device.Much like the seismometer that
geologists use, I was an instrument that received and measured the
environmental conditions for conflict.Often, I could do this long distance over the phone.Sometimes, I’d use this skill like a psychic
to predict potential conflict that lay in the future.Then, I would strenuously avoid those
situations.I can remember at the time
never wanting to be in the same room with two friends who did not like each other.I couldn’t tolerate their enmity even though
their dislike had nothing to do with me.Deep down, I felt that I was not only responsible for their conflict,
but also responsible for resolving something that could not be resolved by
me.The only logical response then was
simply to avoid their company.

As it was bound to, this
exquisite instrument failed.As I grew
older, I had to modify it repeatedly until it was more like a Rube Goldberg
contraption than the instrument I had originally constructed.I developed such sensitivity to any shift in
environmental conditions that I became immobilized.The infinitesimal nuances and shifts of
emotional energy in a room were too complex to process and then to form into an
appropriate response.

As I lie in bed, the Energy
Monster threatening me has come to represent this condition so clearly.I am enormously grateful to Natalie for her
inspired drawing.It has given me a
starting point from which to trace the monster’s journey backward.I can see now that it begins as a ticket of
doubt in need of a customer.I then cash
the doubt in with an experience, such as an ambiguous response from a friend
that might leave me feeling unsettled.Like everyone, I sometimes invite a friend for dinner or to go to a
movie and that friend can’t do it.The
next time I call with an invitation, that friend might be busy that night as
well for any number of legitimate reasons.Without prompting, however, I’ll find a way to blame myself and
characterize the decline as cold rejection.With a sense of desperation I’ll sort through my memory of the most recent
encounters with this friend and identify numerous instances where I “probably”
offended them.The consequences of my
offending behavior have only one conclusion:As a result of my utter repulsiveness, my friend no longer wants to get
together.The reasons are clearly
self-evident.

My choice of career as a
writer has offered a unique opportunity to cash in on this doubt as well.Often, when I mail a manuscript to an editor,
I do not hear from them for months.Instead of calling to check on the editor’s progress through my work, I
create worst case scenarios: the editor is much too embarrassed or repulsed by
the amateurishness, or the bald stupidity, of my efforts to feel it deserves a
response.Ka-ching!The ticket has been purchased at full fare.

At this point the monster is
ready to travel.It approaches
slowly.At first it’s a speck on the
horizon.As I accumulate more experiences
that reinforce my sense of inadequacy, the monster nears.It is as if the monster is now in a car, or a
bus, traveling along a winding road and gaining speed with each pang of
doubt.With the monster approaching, I
can feel my tentative hold on my own sense of adequacy, even legitimacy, begin
to loosen.Here, the monster picks up
speed.He aims for my unprotected
confidence and flattens it on the pavement.I survive, if it can be called survival, with only that wretched, yet
intractable, organ of the spirit, worthlessness.

Out of this diminished state,
my feelings of hopelessness emerge.Effortlessly, I globalize even further and conclude: whatever hopes I
might have for my life are foolish, delusional. My being can then be reduced to
a neat syllogism.I am unloved and
unlovable.Therefore, I cannot
exist.This simple logic would have sent
Descartes to the asylum.These thoughts
are mine.Therefore, I cannot exist.

* * *

Today, I think about
tolerating a certain level of discomfort.I do this by operating at a deliberate pace that allows me to name and
acknowledge my feelings as they arise.That way these feelings cannot spiral out of control unnoticed.One trick has been to avoid multi-tasking
because trying to juggle several things at once distracts me from what I am
feeling.Then these unrecognized
feelings can easily transform into thoughts of disaster.I remind myself, instead, to stay connected
with myself and others.I try to touch
Elise a couple of times a day.Putting
my hand on her shoulder or giving her a hug reminds me that I am loved.At the same time I’ve found exercise
essential to my well-being.When I am
conscious of my breath and the movement of my body, I feel physically stronger,
and from this actual strength I sense myself as more capable of managing what
lies beyond.

I joke with Elise that the
Energy Monster has bought a condo in California.He’s setting down roots there and won’t want
to come back.As I spin this narrative,
I shift the paradigm of being Depression’s victim just a little.My encounter with the monster I now view from
its perspective as well as my own.He has
a real home and real needs. Much like the monster in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, my monster is normalized through this process.It no longer resides within the traditional
horror story model—me a victim of its possession.Instead, I have come to see my circumstances
from the monster’s perspective, where I can discover the kind of sustenance it
needs to survive alone in California.

I’ve come to learn much about
my monster and our consanguinity.My
daughter’s drawing keeps me alert to discovering more about him so that some
day, in the future, I can have the presence of mind to know when my feelings
are myth—belonging therefore to the Monster—and when they are “mine.”I must do this because what I’ve read about
depression and what I’ve been told by my psychiatrist and my therapist is that
the likelihood of the monster returning is high.I am not like my friend Susan or my wife
Elise, or even the parishioners of my childhood.I cannot be relieved of its presence for
eternity.I can just hope that the intervals
between its return are longer and that its stays are shorter and less
intense.I just hope … I can only hope.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

I
am gullible. Always have been, always will be. I will believe almost anything
at least for a while. At seventeen, I moved to NYC and got a job as a messenger
my first week. The man who hired me asked, “You know the city, right?”

I lied.

At the end of the week, I received
my first paycheck for something around $79. I promptly lost it to a Three Card
Monte dealer in Times Square. I was certain I knew where the queen of hearts was.
So certain, in fact, that I returned the next Friday and lost half of that week’s
paycheck. Then I figured it out. I was never going to win, no matter how many
times the other guy standing next me wins. That guy was in cahoots with the dealer.

When I was around 13, Susan dated a
boy who bagged groceries. He drove a jacked up Cougar with something called “glass
packs.” Whatever they were, they made his car unbearably loud. This was a time
when young men would park their cars in Memphis’s Overland Park and work on
their cars. They’d dump the oil into the drains and stand around smoking
and leaning against car hoods and trunks in wife-beaters and jeans. Just being incredibly cool.

When I was around him, there was one question that had bothered, and I finally screwed up the courage to ask. “Why
is the back of your car jacked up like that?”

“Saves on gas,” he smiled, “cause I’m
always going downhill.”

I believed him. It made sense to me.
Why else would someone do that to their car?

I was even more gullible a year
earlier. That was the summer Dad has kicked us out of California and we had
ended up back in Memphis. For most of the summer, we lived with Uncle Ben and
Aunt Emmaline in their mansion. Uncle Ben was one of the original developers
and owners of Holiday Inns. He was also Mom’s older brother.

By the end of the summer, we had
moved into a townhouse rental about a mile down the road from Uncle Ben’s
mansion, and we made friends with the other kids in the neighborhood. On the
weekends, three or four of us would go camping on the abandoned King
Plantation. But first, we’d hang out in front of the liquor store and beg people to
buy us bottles of Boones Farm Strawberry Wine, one for each of us. It cost a dollar a quart. Then, we’d hop on our bikes and ride down to the
Christian Country Day School where the trail head to the plantation’s woods was
located.

We’d ditch our bikes in the brush
and march into our campground. Then, we’d proceed to drink until we were too
drunk to move. Sometimes we had a campfire. Other times, we never got to it.

One
time, or rather most times, I got so drunk I passed out. This time, however, I
woke the next morning and went over to put on my low top Chuck Taylors. They
were sopping wet. I felt the ground, but it was bone dry. It hadn’t rained and
there didn’t seem to be any morning dew.

No one else’s shoes were wet.

My
friends laughed and whispered, but I didn’t understand so
I ignored them.

I couldn’t figure out how my shoes
could have gotten so wet. It was a freak incident. It wasn’t like we had
bottles of water or canteens and they were poured on our shoes. It wasn’t
possible that any of us would have poured out Boones Farm. The wine was just
too precious.

So I put on my shoes and we all
retrieved our bikes and rode home. My mom put my clothes and my shoes in the
washing machine. As she emptied my pockets, she found a pack of
Marlboros. These weren’t the kind of cigarettes she smoked so she gave them to
her mother, my Granny. She gave me a lecture on smoking, but her heart wasn’t
in it.

It wasn’t until my twenties, thought, that one
dark night I woke in a sweat and realized how my Chuck Taylors has gotten wet.
My friends has pissed all over them. That was why they were laughing. They
thought it was hilarious. It was also around this time that I also realized that
Susan’s boyfriend had lied. Having a car jacked up in the back would
never save on gas.

I
still have those moments late at night, when I’m half awake, struggling to dig
deeper into unconsciousness, that memories like these rise up out of a fog
and startle me awake. They’re like that jolt you have when you’re dreaming that
your falling and falling and then suddenly you jerk awake. And you know.
Everything that you thought was true is actually a lie.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

“Okay, William, I’m done for the
week,” called a woman across the hall. “You here, right?”

William got up from his desk and
stepped into the hallway. “I’ll be here, Miz Jackson. Don’t worry. I’m not
going anywhere.”

She nodded and headed out the door.

It had taken a couple of days before
William was free to see me. We met in his city office. He’s an account for the
city and president of the local chapter of the NAACP. His father and uncle were
founding members of the chapter in the 50s.

As he went around his desk to sit, William
Edwards, Laverne Edward’s son, explained, “In city offices as in most small
town government offices in the South, it is still not a guarantee that African
American citizens will be respected and receive the services they are
requesting. Sometimes it’s just the legacy of the Jim Crow South, and older
African Americans simply do not feel safe or confident that they will be
treated with respect or will be told the truth.”

I nodded as if I understood. It had
never occurred to me that something like that would be important. I could
understand that something would have been necessary in the past, but in the 21st
century. Had things not changed that much?

“So I have to be in the office for
the rest of the week,” he said, “because there always has to be an N.I.C in the
building.”

“N.I.C.?”

“Negro in Charge,” William said.

“But you’re upstairs in the
accounting office. When do people need to see you about the city’s finances.”

William smiled like I was an
ignorant child. “No, that’s not the problem. Black people will come downstairs
to pay their taxes or request services, but they don’t trust that they will get
what they need. So they come upstairs to see me first and I do it for them.”

“Really?” It just seemed crazy on
one level, but then I remembered a week earlier hearing from Judge Vaughn, the
man who ran Tipton Country for several decades. When I met with him in his huge
plantation house with Corinthian columns, he told me two stories about my
family. The first was about my father’s namesake and Grandfather Joe’s older brother.
Carrick Hill was a farmer who was shot and killed in 1919 on the town square.

When I asked him about my
Grandfather’s death, he told this instead. He was very skilled at changing the
topic and stonewalling me on the topic on how Covington was run during those
dark, old days.

“Oh, I know your family,” he
cackled. “Your great uncle Carrick Hill was shot in the groin on the square by
the Marshall because he was sleeping with the Marshall’s wife.”

He paused for effect.

“He bled out on the sidewalk. The
Marshall wouldn’t let no one help him.”

The next story he shared was how Grandfather
Joe bought his farm.

“You know I knew your grandfather.
Did you ever hear how he bought his farm?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it was during the Depression.
Cotton prices had dropped so much that it cost farmers more to grow it than it
was worth. Well, your grandfather was sharecropping a farm owned by the local
doctor. They had a barn packed full of cotton that they couldn’t sell. One
night the barn burned with all the cotton in it. The doctor got the insurance
money and was grateful to your grandfather for all the hard work he had done on
the farm.”

Again, I nodded. I didn’t want to
interrupt him because it was clear he was trying to tell me something.

Judge Vaughn sipped on his can of
beer. “It wasn’t six months later that your grandfather bought 80 acres out in
Solo. There was an auction at the courthouse on the land and your grandfather
was the highest bidder. The doctor financed your grandfather’s purchase with
the insurance money.”

Later, I learned through my research
at the University of Memphis library and from the county historian David Gwynn
that these “auctions” were rigged. Farms owned by black families were targeted for
not paying back taxes. These were farms that were purchased during
Reconstruction by African Americans and then inherited by the children. Often,
these farms were owned by families who could not read or write so the title of
the land was not completely clear after the original owner passed. In addition,
these families might not have known they had to pay taxes or had actually paid
taxes but did not have the receipts proving it.

The
result was that white men in the city and county government would make
arrangements with their friends to seize the land and auction it off on the
City Hall steps. The auctions were rarely announced in advance and it was arranged
who would be the sole bidder and what amount he would bid. This is how
Grandfather Joe most likely bought his first farm. He purchased more in the
middle of the Depression, but I don’t know if he availed himself of the same
rigged system.

Sitting in William’s office, I
imagined that if I were African American, I wouldn’t want some white person I didn't
know telling me what the rules were. I’d come to William, too. Or the woman
whose office was across the hall.

“I’m not sure I can help,” William
told me after I explained why I wanted to talk to his mother. “My mother has
Alzheimer’s. She couldn't help you on this.”

“Do you remember this happening?” I
asked.

“I have some vague memory, but I was
a kid, and my parents didn’t allow us kids to know much about that. They
protected us. We were never allowed ride the bus or eat at a restaurant. They
didn’t want to experience segregation.”

I felt like I had hit a wall. This
was the last piece of information I needed to prove that Grandfather Joe wasn’t
murdered. I didn’t know how else to go to pursue this. “Do you know anyone I
could talk to?”

William at first shook his head. “I’m
not sure. Let me think about it. I’ll talk to my aunt and see what she
remembers.”

A few days later, William asked to
meet me for dinner in Memphis with friends. After that, I had lunch with his
older brother at the last cafeteria restaurant in Memphis. This was my maternal
Grandmother Baden Carrick’s favorite restaurant. I hadn’t been there in years
and it hadn’t changed. A week after that William called me again and suggested
we go down to Clarksdale for the Juke Joint Festival. I danced until I had to
change my shirt. Everybody laughed at me and shouted, “White boy dancing!”

At some point along the way, my
willingness to humiliate myself dancing allowed me to crossover from an unknown
quantity to a known. I got a call inviting me to meet him at his mother’s house
before going to dinner together one evening.

Laverne Edwards’ home was a
beautifully kept suburban ranch on a tree lined street. When I entered her home,
it was full of family members. I brought a couple of autographed copies of my
book Harlem Stomp! Mrs. Edwards was
standing in the hallway a little agitated. We moved to the living room and sat
down. I was offered tea or a soda.

Sitting around the room were Laverne
Edwards, her sister, William, William’s brother, and two others whose family connections
I don’t remember.

After introductions and some light
conversation, William spoke for everyone.

“My mother returned to Tipton
Memorial just few months before your Grandfather was admitted. It had taken
four years and the Federal Court forced the hospital to hire her back and give
her back pay. When that boy was murdered, my uncle Mac Edwards was the
president of the local chapter of the NAACP. My father and my uncle made plans
to attend the trial. My mother and aunt attended too.”

Jessie Nelson’s trial had lasted
only one day, so it hadn’t been a hardship to attend.

“When your grandfather went into the
hospital, he was one of my mother’s patients like all the patients on that
floor, black or white. What we remember is that his son and his wife caused a
stir about my mother being on the floor, but the hospital supported her. There
was a new director at the hospital, and he wasn’t as bad as the last. So she
was just doing what she was supposed to. And when he passed, his wife accused
my mother of killing him. The hospital supported her and told the family they
were wrong.”

“That must have been horrible for
your family,” I said.

“It was. It hurt my mother deeply.
She was proud of her achievements and to have somebody accuse her of murder was
terrible,” said William, “but it wasn’t surprising. That kind of thing happened
all the time.”

I could just imagine how on April 3,
1969, a year and a day short after the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr., forty miles away in Memphis, my Uncle Melvin and Grandmother Zoelette
would feel a deep sense of justice deserved. In the past year, most white
Memphians and those in neighboring communities had come to believe that they
were the true victims of King’s assassination. Their twisted logic argued that the
loss of one of America’s greatest and most courageous figures was actually a
threat to their own lives. King’s death deepened the feeling in the white
community that African Americans were dangerous and out to steal from them
their hard-earned way of life. How they perceived the black community in aftermath
of the assassination was not as a population, but as a populace who had turned
from a docile and controllable to a threatening and dangerous swarm.

My Uncle Melvin and Grandmother
Zoelette’s blindness was a blindness that was common and in a way is still
common today. It was a blindness that they were completely invested in because
to do otherwise would be to deny their sense of justice and righteousness.
Grandfather Joe’s friend Jessie Nelson had just been convicted of manslaughter
for what they saw was clearly to them an accident. He would have to suffer
eight months of imprisonment that, according to them and even some of the
jurors, he did not deserve. Grandfather Joe had martyred himself by refusing to
go to the hospital until after the trial. According to Uncle Melvin and Dad, he
was a man who cared too much, so much so that he had endangered his life by not
going to the hospital.

Within this rubric, Uncle Melvin and
Grandmother Zolette concluded that Grandfather Joe is murdered by the mother of
the boy who Nelson had accidentally killed. They did not bother to investigate
if this could be true. They saw a black woman, Laverne Edwards, at the trial
and saw her again at the hospital. They simply assumed she must be the mother
of the boy killed, even though it was the other boy, the boy wounded in the
arm, whose last name was Edwards. They didn’t bother with such seemingly
insignificant details when compared to their righteousness.

What
their story revealed to them was that the world was going from bad to worse. They
must have believed that this would never have happened a decade earlier. From
the way that Dad and Uncle Melvin and Dad’s second wife Kati have narrated the
events, I can piece together an interpretation that seems both insane and
logical. It makes perfect sense that my family would believe that Grandfather
Joe was murdered by the mother of the boy who died in Grandfather Joe’s
segregated J&Z Laundromat. (By the way, the white J&Z Laundromat was
located on the white side of the town.) It made perfect sense that my
grandfather could be both heroic in staying by his friend’s side during the
trial and being on death’s door, and then not die because of his refusal to get
treatment, but be murdered. They could ignore the fact that Grandfather Joe not
only had a life-threatening case of pneumonia, but also severe Type II
Diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, and Hepatitis C. That his entire immune
systems and organs were deeply compromised.

The
horrible irony here is that my family constructed a highly charged narrative
that completely erased the truth about Grandfather Joe’s life and replaced it
with an alternative history that enshrined him in righteousness. What this
story does is wipe away the truth about who he really was. Grandfather Joe
spent his life abusing himself with alcohol and violently taking advantage of
African Americans in Tipton County. He had been involved as a Deputy Marshall
with the City Marshall in a lynching in 1949. He was fired from the police
department in 1957 for drunkenness and being too violent. This in a city where
the police chief was nicknamed “Stick” and was notorious for their their
violence towards blacks.

In
my family’s narrative, Grandfather Joe is transformed from being an abusive
victimizer to being victimized. What heightened this seeming truth for them was
the fact that neither the hospital nor the police would investigate. The
hospital refused to do an autopsy because it was clear what he had died of. The
police told them there was nothing to investigate.

It took hardly any time for me to
uncover the true story behind Grandfather Joe’s death. If Grandmother Zoelette
or Uncle Melvin or even Dad had wanted to find the truth, they could have with
a phone call or two, but that wasn't in their interest. That would have never
have allowed them to construct a narrative that made them the victims of these
changing times when blacks were able to not only demand their civil rights
without the threat of death, but actually receive them.

When I finally told Uncle Melvin and
Dad what I had uncovered. Dad was silent. He seemed to understand what I was
telling him, but he also didn’t seem to accept it. Uncle Melvin was even more
adamant.

“I
know what I saw and I saw that woman come out of Dad’s room. Then, when I went
in he died.”

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Laverne
Edwards was a nurse at Tipton Country Hospital, where Grandfather Joe died.

“She
just started on and Mrs. Hill accused her of killing Mr. Hill.”

“Do
you know what happened?” I asked.

The
television blared a game show in the background. Eveline edged forward in her
seat. Mr. Edwards collapsed in his overstuffed tried to follow the conversation
and not completely succeeding.

“No,
I don’t,” she said.

“Is
Mrs. Edwards related?”

“No,
they’s the other Edwards. She was married to John Edwards, but he passed.”

After
I left, I dropped by Tim Sloane’s house and shared what I found out. He was
knee deep himself in researching his family’s background. His father had been
the priest at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Covington and Director of St.
Paul’s Parochial School, an African American boarding school, founded in the
late 19th century, in Malone. He died suddenly when Tim was a young
boy. Now, in his early seventies, Tim seemed to be trying to grasp onto a past
thin and whispy as smoke.

“Laverne
Edwards was married to John Edwards who was brother to Mac Edwards,” began Tim.
“You should talk to William, her son.” He pointed to the list he made for me
with a column for whites and one for blacks. “He’s an accountant for the city,
but before you do, call David Gwyne, if there’s anyone in Covington who knows
what happened, David’s the person to talk to. David is the Tipton County
historian, and he’s helped me on my research.” I would learn later that David
is also the manager of the town cemetery.

As
I dialed David’s phone number, I felt like I was perhaps getting closer to an
answer. If an answer could be found, it would be from the lips of Laverne
Edwards.

I picked up David, who doesn’t
drive, at his mother’s nursing home in Covington. We drove down to a restaurant
in Brighton on Highway 51 where we talked for about an hour over dinner. Then,
David started giving me a tour of Covington. I’ll write about much of our
conversations of the next six weeks in other posts. This evening, however,
David directed me to the Covington Cemetery.

“I think I know where Jessie Nelson
is buried, but I’m not sure because his grave isn’t marked. There’s a space
next to his mother’s grave and it would make sense that this is where he was.”

He
reached into his briefcase and pulled out a wooden branch with its bark
removed. It was a smooth piece of wood shaped in a Y. It was a divining rod. He
led me to the other side of the graveyard.

“This
is his mother’s grave. I looked it up earlier today to make sure I could find
it.”

I
could barely read the name Nelson on the stone.

David
held his diving rod with both hands and waved it over the empty space next to
the marked grave. I could see the rod point downward.

“See
here. The earth here is displaced,” explained David, “so the rod dips. If it
was solid, it wouldn’t.”

“Is
he here?”

“Yes,
this most likely where Jessie Nelson was buried.”

Over
the course of the evening, David told me the story of Laverne Edwards.

“Mrs.
Edwards was the first and only African American nurse to be hired at Covington
Hospital (now Baptist-Memorial Hospital—Tipton) when the hospital opened in
1964. And when she began, she wasn’t allowed to use the restroom that white
nurses used, eat in the cafeteria, or use the white nurses’ break room. She had
to go to the bathroom with the janitors and eat her lunch with them in the
basement.”

I
wasn’t surprised by this story. Covington wasn’t at all on the cutting edge
integration. In fact, it fought changed tooth and nail. David would tell me
that there was a KKK office on the town square next to the Covington Police
Station when Robert Lee Smith was murdered by Jessie Nelson.

“Well,
it didn't sit right with her so she complained to the hospital director. His
response was to fire her.” Clearly, he didn’t want any uppity black woman on
his staff.

David
explained that Laverne Edwards was married to John Edwards who was one of the
founders of the local chapter of the NAACP. John Edwards brother was Mac
Edwards, the president of the chapter. The chapter met secretly in the basement
of the Canaan Baptist Church because if the Klan found out, the church and
their homes would have been burned down. It wasn’t uncommon for black churches
to be burned in Tipton, or anywhere around the South at that time.

With
her husband’s support, Laverne Edwards sued the hospital for violating civil
rights. After winding four years through the courts, she won in Federal court.
The hospital was forced to give her job back. Obviously, it was the talk of
Covington. Everyone had an opinion about it, and these opinions mostly fell
along racial lines.

Just
after Laverne Edwards returned to the hospital, Grandfather Joe entered the
hospital on March 18th, 1969, two months almost to the day after
Robert Lee Smith was murdered by Jessie Nelson. Grandfather Joe was 69 years
old and sick with pneumonia. He had been ill all through the trial, but had
refused to see a doctor until the trial ended. By then, he was so sick that he
was on death’s doorstep. Not only did he have pneumonia, but he also had cirrhosis
of the liver, Type 2 Diabetes, and emphysema. To say he was not well would be
an understatement. Between his decades smoking and drinking, his immune system
was clearly compromised. In layman’s terms, he had abused his body in about
every way possible without already being dead.

It
was just before Grandfather Joe’s arrival that Mrs. Edwards returned to work.
As anyone can imagine, with Laverne Edwards return it was incredibly tense at the
hospital. They were under a court order to allow her to have all the rights and
privileges of her white co-workers.

This
was as far as David could take me. I need to speak with Laverne Edwards. According
to Frances Edwards, she was the person who was accused of murdering Grandfather
Joe. This meant I needed to reach out to her son William.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Grandfather
Joe was very good at two things, plundering and getting drunk. One gave him
opportunity in a world that offered little for a man who was removed from
school in the second grade to work the cotton fields because his teacher
thought he was “retarded.” Only years later did he learn that he was merely
nearsighted, not mentally deficient. Life was hard for everyone in Tipton
County, Tennessee, but it was especially hard on the people Grandfather Joe
exploited through the reign of terror that was the Jim Crow South.

Ironically,
however, it was the second thing, his alcoholism, that ensured he would never
truly prosper the way others around him did from his plundering. His plundering
allowed him to get out of the fields and let others sharecrop his land while he
went off on his get rich quick schemes that could only happen in a small,
backwards community like Covington.

To
describe Grandfather Joe’s life, I’ve stolen myself. I’ve looted the word
“plunder” from Ta-Nehisi Coates, an African American writer more skilled and
insightful than I could ever be, and his superb book Between the World and Me. Coates chose the vivid and charged verb
“plunder” to describe how America—from its inception—tortured, raped, and
murdered African Americans in order to create economic prosperity. America is
not the richest and largest economy in the world without having been built on
the exploitation of African Americans.

Coates
provocatively argues that America is the nexus of “when plunder becomes a
system of government.” What makes Coates’ argument so powerful is how he
anchors it in American mythology and steals the word “plunder” himself from the
Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson had chosen “plunder” to describe
the Colonies’ relationship to the British Crown—“He has plundered our seas,
ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” To
link the birth of our nation and its successful breaking of the fetters of
British oppression to America’s systematic oppression of African Americans is
brilliant. With one vivid and active verb, Coates is able to reach back into
our country’s origin narrative to expose our guilt and to point to the fact that this
plundering is still happening.

The
reason I mention Coates and his game-changing book Between the World and Me is that he tells the story from the
perspective of the victims. I am telling the story of a victimizer. Grandfather
Joe wasn’t especially brilliant or imaginative in his plundering, but he was
determined and availed himself of the corrupt system in a county that was
described by the FBI and the ATF as the most corrupt county in Tennessee. But
before I get into this, let me begin at my beginning of discovering this world
that through silence was hidden from me until my luncheon reunion with Dad
after 17 years.

In
order to break this silence, this hidden world, I needed a guide, actually more
than one guide. My first was Tim Sloane. Dad introduced me to him at Neely’s
Down Under, a restaurant in the basement of the old Naifeh’s Grocery Store on
the Covington town square. Tim had been the president of a bank on the town
square. He spent his entire career there since the early 60s and knew pretty
much everyone in Covington and Tipton County. He had been on just about every
board or committee at some point or another.

When
we first met, I had explained what I was looking for. He had not heard the
story of Grandfather Joe’s alleged murder, which was my second red flag after
just the fact that it had been a secret in my family for over 40 years. Tim knew
more about the personal lives of his neighbors than even the local ministers. When
we sat down in his office just off the square, he took a blank sheet of paper
filled the left side with the names and phone numbers of the white people I
should contact. Then, on the right side he wrote names and phone numbers of the
African Americans. Since everything we were talking about had to do with race,
this separation made sense, but it also underscored just how much the world in
seen in black and white.

Tim
gave me the keys to his office and a room in his house to sleep in, and then he
set me in motion. After two phone calls on my first day in Covington, I was
pulling up to the South Station of the Covington Fire Station. Larry Edward’s
younger brother Dwayne was one of two black fire fighters in the entire department.
Larry Edwards had been the lucky one on that night in January 1969. He had only
been shot in the arm. His friend, 14-year-old Robert Lee Smith, died from the gunshot
wounds he received from Grandfather Joe’s gun in J&Z Laundromat.

To
put it simply, I was scared to death. Dwayne had invited me over the station to
talk. He was friendly on the phone when I described what I was investigating,
but I didn’t know what it would be like in person. When I got there, he told me
he had already spoken to his parents.

“I’m
not sure what I can tell you,” he said. “I was too young to remember what
happened. All I know is that it changed Larry. He never wanted to go out of the
house anymore. The moment he graduated from high school he moved to Detroit and
never comes back. He won’t talk about it either.”

We
talk a couple minutes about growing up in Covington. I asked him why he stayed.
He talked about his parents and his wife and children and the church, the
Canaan Baptist Church, the oldest black church in Covington and the location of
the early, secret meetings of the original chapter of the Tipton Co. NAACP in
the 50s.

After
about ten minutes of conversation, he asked, “Would you like to talk to my
parents? I can call them and see if they will talk to you.”

“Yes,”
I said.

This
was happening faster than I expected. Dwayne was so friendly and welcoming,
despite me being the grandson of the man who had been part of so much trauma. I
was distrustful of his kindness, however. As a child, I would mistake the
superficial friendliness of Southern culture for real friendship, only to be
humiliated when I was confronted with the fact that they weren’t my friends.

“She
says you can come over.”

We
shook hands. He writes down his parents’ address and invites me to Sunday
service at Canaan Baptist.

I’m
in motion. Like a top whose string and has been pulled, I will spin until I tip
over and roll in a circle. Suddenly, all the hate and anger that had driven me
back to Covington felt like an enormous weight that slowed me. I couldn’t lift
it off my shoulders. Why was I hear?

Grandfather
Joe’s favorite TV show was Dagnet. As
a former town deputy marshal and police officer, he fancied himself Sgt. Joe
Friday cutting the bullshit out and saying, “Ma’am, just the facts.”

I drove from the South Fire Station
to the northeast neighborhood called Black Bottoms, I realized I wasn’t here
for just the facts. The facts would never cut it. I was here to prove
something. To prove that I’m not crazy. To prove that what happened to me wasn’t
my fault. For the longest time I imagined Dad as Odysseus, that heroic figure
from the ages of the Gods and Goddesses. He had overcome Homeric obstacles to
rise to the pinnacle of capitalism. He was the classic rags to riches story.
Grew up on a shotgun shack without running water or electricity. Slept in a bed
with his two brothers. His mother cooked on a wood stove. His father was illiterate.
His mother married at 13. He was the first to graduate from the 8th
grade, from high school, from college, from Harvard. He rose to become president
and chairman of department store chains.

In his massive shadow, I stood as
Odysseus’s inadequate son, Telemachus. I was Charlie Chan’s Number Two Son who stumbled
and tried to solve the mystery and save the day, but would have to be bailed
out my my superior father. I would never measure up. So in my car heading
across town to the Edwards’ home, I realized this wasn’t about hate. It was
about restitution. About my coming to terms with who I was in the shadow of my
father. It was a reckoning. When I think about why Dad told me this story—so
suddenly after no speaking for 17 years—I believe he did so because he wanted
me to find out the truth. He was putting his faith and trust in me. For the
first time, the power dynamic had shifted. I was no longer desperate for his
gaze. Now, he wanted mine, and this was the mission that would keep mine on
him. This story hadn’t been shared with anyone in the family from my
generation. It was a close held secret between my dad, his brothers, their
wives, and their mother.

I
turned onto s small single lane path, named Feezor St., in the Black Bottoms,
one of several African American neighborhoods in Covington, and pulled to a
stop on the grassy shoulder in front of a small, squat house, no more than 750
square feet. This was the home of Eddie and Mary Frances Edwards, Larry and
Dwayne’s parents.

I
had read about them in the documents from the civil suit that they filed after
the trial. They sued Jessie Nelson and Grandother Zoelette. Grandfather Joe had
already passed by then. The suit was settled for $1,500 with $500 going to the
Edwards’ lawyer. Grandmother Zolette paid the full amount. Jessie had a
railroad pension, but he was essentially destitute. He lived with his mother
one block from the Edwards on Feezer in the white block.

In
Covington, black and white neighborhoods could change sometimes mid-block. A
pocket of black homes could be nestled in the middle of white ones. Blacks
neighborhoods had names, such as McCadden Quarters (a single block), Hefer
Flats, Dixie Editions, and Black Bottoms, which was near the cotton warehouses.
The Edwards lived in Black Bottoms and Eddie Edwards worked his entire life in
the cotton warehouse, now gone.

As
I walked up to the front door, I could hear the television. A woman about my
age peered through the screen door. It was a cool day in April, one of the few
times when the weather was moderate enough to have the door open and let the
fresh air inside. I knew I was anything but fresh air. My wind was a gnarled,
broken thing.

I
introduced myself and mentioned Dwayne.

She
waved me inside. The small, almost dollhouse living room was crammed with
overstuffed chairs and a couch. A large flat screen TV hung from one wall. This
was the home that Larry Edwards grew up in with his parents and sisters and
brothers. How they all fit in was beyond comprehension, but they did.

An
ancient man sat nodding off engulfed by a large overstuffed chair. He was frail
and seemed a shadow of his former self. The woman introduced herself as Larry’s
older sister, Eveline, and the man as her father. I shook their hands and took
a seat on the couch.

“I’ll
get my mom.” The woman disappeared into the back. A moment later, Mrs. Edwards
appeared. We shook hands. She didn’t offer me anything to drink. It was clear
that they didn’t understand why this white man was coming in their house, but
they weren’t going to be rude.

I
told them who I was, Joe Hill’s grandson.

“He
was evil,” Mrs. Edwards said almost under her breath.

I
agree and told her a little about my relationship with him. Then, I told them
what my grandfather told me.

“I
don’t know nothing about that,” Mrs. Edwards quickly said.

We
talked about Larry.

“After
that, he changed,” Mrs. Edwards explained. “He didn’t want to be here any more.
The moment he graduated from high school he moved to Detroit and won’t come
back.” Most blacks from Covington chose Detroit as their destination when they
moved North. There, they would find family and friends and a church they
recognized.

“Larry
had it rough here,” Larry’s sister Eveline said. “On the way to school we had
to walk through the white neighborhood and this lady would sick her dog on
Larry. Every day the dog would attack him and pull off his clothes. There was
nothing he could do about it.

“When
he was shot, he and Bobbie were coming home from the Fraser High Homecoming
Night. The basketball team had won its game,” Eveline said. “They decided to
stop at the Laundromat because it had a Co’Cola machine. It was the only place
blacks could buy a coke at night.”

I
told them I remember the machine and shared the time I took a coke without
asking. Grandfather Joe beat me.

“That
machine didn’t work right,” Eveline said. “You had to shake it so the nickel
would go down. And that man came out and shot him.”

I
nodded and waited. Then, I asked, “Did you know Jessie Nelson.”

Mrs.
Edwards spoke up. “He lived just down there.” She pointed to the next block
over.

I
asked if he knew Larry and Bobbie.

“Had
to,” said Eveline. “He shot them in cold blood.”

I
asked if they knew Frankie Smith.

“Not
well,” said Mrs. Edwards.

“Do
you know how to get in touch with her?”

“She
dead.”

I
told them the story my dad told me about Mrs. Smith killing my grandfather.

“No,
no, no,” said Mrs. Edwards. “That couldn’t have happened. She never worked. She
stayed in the home. It was me who worked in the hospital.”

I
waited again to see if she would finish the story. If she would tell me about
being accused of murdering my grandfather. When she said nothing, I finally
asked.

Mrs.
Edwards shook her head. “It wasn’t me. I was a nurse’s aide on a different
floor. I never went to the floor where Mr. Hill was.”

About Me

Laban Carrick Hill is exploring growing up in a family that was on the wrong side of the Civil Rights Movement and swung from prosperity to poverty. He is currently a high school teacher in Vermont. He is a co-director and co-founder of the Writers Project of Ghana, a nonprofit based in the Ghana and the US. Hill is the author of more than 40 books, including When the Beat Was Born: DJ Kool Herc and the Creation of Hip Hop (Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award); Dave the Potter: Artist, Slave, Poet (Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Award), America Dreaming: How Youth Changed America (2007 Parenting Publications Gold Award), Casa Azul (NYPL Best Book for the Teen Age 2007), and Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance (National Book Award Finalist).